


this love immortal is an assassin's delight

by voxofthevoid



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Anal Sex, Bucky Barnes as Captain America, Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Sex, Enthusiastic Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Oral Sex, Post-Avengers (2012), Rimming, Standard Winter Soldier Warnings, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Surprise Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-07 22:03:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20316718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxofthevoid/pseuds/voxofthevoid
Summary: “Captain America lives on the top floor. Roof access. This is the closest we can get with camera surveillance. Stark hasn’t started sweeping random bakeries, not yet. Think you can handle the mission?”The Soldier has killed presidents and priests, drug lords and diplomats, people with small armies to protect them and people who could make him break a sweat as they fought for their lives. He has shaped the century.These are facts, not memories.But he knows this is nothing, this mission. Follow a lone man around the city. Break into his apartment. Watch and observe.“Yes,” he says.“Guess Pierce was right. This is ironic. Fucking poetic even.” Rumlow snorts. “Barnes is a supersoldier. You’re the only one who can take care of him, isn’t that right, Cap?”That is not the Soldier’s designation. He nods anyway.-After the Battle of New York, Captain America refuses to work for S.H.I.E.L.D and remains in New York. Alexander Pierce activates the Winter Soldier to handle the situation and unknowingly signs Hydra’s death warrant.





	this love immortal is an assassin's delight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [possibleplatypus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibleplatypus/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [唯爱永存（this love immortal is an assassin's delight）](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22815961) by [LilacRain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilacRain/pseuds/LilacRain)

> This is a birthday gift for [possibleplatypus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibleplatypus/pseuds/possibleplatypus). Buddy, I don’t know whether today’s the right date or if I’m literally a week early, and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by asking to check. Either way, this is for you. We don’t know each other that well, but you’ve stuck with me for over a year through two very different fandoms and been supportive as all hell with your lovely, thoughtful comments. Happy birthday, and I hope you have a wonderful year!
> 
> I was sitting on this idea for a month or two, thinking it’d be something short and cracky. It ended up being neither, so now we have almost 13k of emotional shenanigans. I’ve got a [tumblr here](https://voxofthevoid.tumblr.com/) if you wanna come chat.

“He’s been very calm today. Didn’t fight the wipes. Didn’t scream much either.”

The Soldier doesn’t open his eyes. They’re talking about him, but they don’t need his input. They never do. He listens anyway, resting as he does, muscles locked tight against the tremors that threaten his body. The wipes ruin his control over his body, but weakness is not allowed.

The Soldier doesn’t remember much, but he remembers that.

“That’s good,” says another voice. Familiar. “Asset, look at me.”

The Soldier opens his eyes.

The man is old, but he wears power like a cloak. The Soldier doesn’t remember his face, but he knows its shape. He knows a lot of things he doesn’t remember.

“Do you know who I am?”

The Soldier shakes his head. Even if he did, questions like these only have the one answer. The man smiles, proving the Soldier right.

“You can call me Mr. Secretary. You have a mission, son. They found the Valkyrie, and Bucky Barnes inside of it. They have a new Captain America now. A fake but as authentic a fake as they can get. Any of this ringing a bell?”

The Soldier blinks. He understood everything the Secretary said. Intel is important, and the Soldier doesn’t forget even a scrap of information – not until they make him forget.

The Secretary smiles. It’s pleasant and pleased. It makes the Soldier’s hair stand on end.

“Sir,” one of the technicians says softly, “it’s dangerous to try and trigger his memories.”

“There are no memories to trigger,” the Secretary says calmly. “All he’s got in his brain is data we put in. Look at him. Does it look like he remembers a damn thing?”

The technicians look at him. The Soldier ignores them, keeps his eyes on the Secretary. There are armed men behind him, guns pointed at the Soldier though he is restrained, arms locked in the cold metal of the chair. His temples still ache from the electricity, even though it’s been two hours since the wipe.

“Captain America is your mission,” the Secretary tells the Soldier. “You are not to engage. Observe him. Learn his patterns. Report to your handler. When the time is right, we will tell you to strike.”

“Are you sure that’s safe?” asks one of the armed men behind the Secretary. “That’s too long a leash for him.”

“You are the leash, Rumlow,” the Secretary responds genially. “I’m sure you can act accordingly.”

“Yeah, of course, but we could just kill Barnes.”

The Soldier looks at Rumlow. Memorizes the contours of his face. His handler.

“Killing Barnes now would make him a martyr and likely draw Fury’s and Stark’s attention. We can’t risk that until Insight takes off. Captain America, original or fake, cannot be killed just like that. Since Barnes refused to work for S.H.I.E.L.D and remains in New York, this is the best course of action.”

Rumlow steps forward, coming to a stop just a foot behind the Secretary. He’s looking at the Soldier with bright eyes; the manic glint in them almost hides the fear, but the Soldier sees it. He is very accustomed to spotting fear in others’ eyes.

“Does it have to be him?” Rumlow asks.

He flinches the next second when the Secretary turns to look at him. His expression is hidden from the Soldier, but Rumlow’s grimace and body language tell him enough.

“With the situation as it is, do you have any other suggestions, Brock?” Rumlow remains wisely quiet. The Secretary turns back to the Soldier, smiling that bland, genial smile again. “Besides, I thought you, of all people, would appreciate the irony here.”

-

“Just so you know, I blame Stark,” Rumlow says as he leads the Soldier into the apartment they are to stay in for the duration of the mission. “He just had to sweep in and sweep out all the bugs we placed in Barnes’s place. And now he does it fucking regularly. You know how much effort we went into to get all those in there? Now, the whole fucking building is a digital fortress thanks to Stark, and Barnes spots regular tails within fifteen minutes tops. Only other fucking place he stays in is the Tower, and that AI would rip our system to shreds if we tried to interfere. Even Zola’s scared of him.”

Rumlow, the Soldier has discovered, talks a lot. He likes the sound of his own voice. The Soldier likes the information he lets slip, even if some of the names make something deep inside him flinch.

He shows none of this on his face.

“I don’t even know why I bother with you.” Rumlow’s looking at the Soldier now, grinning crookedly. “Not like any of this registers after all the times we’ve put your brain in a blender.”

The Soldier ignores Rumlow in favor of going through the apartment, cataloguing sightlines and exits. He’s unlikely to spend much time here, but it’s wise to the know the ins and outs of the base.

When he circles back to Rumlow, he finds the man setting up a laptop on the kitchen table. He waves the Soldier over.

The screen shows the live feed of the front of a four-story apartment complex.

“Captain America lives on the top floor. Roof access. This is the closest we can get with camera surveillance. Stark hasn’t started sweeping random bakeries, not yet.” The Soldier can see, from the corners of his eyes, Rumlow looking at him. “Think you can handle the mission?”

The Soldier has killed presidents and priests, drug lords and diplomats, people with small armies to protect them and people who could make him break a sweat as they fought for their lives. He has shaped the century.

These are facts, not memories.

But he knows this is nothing, this mission. Follow a lone man around the city. Break into his apartment. Watch and observe.

“Yes,” he says.

“Guess Pierce was right. This is ironic. Fucking poetic even.” Rumlow snorts. “Barnes is a supersoldier. You’re the only one who can take care of him, isn’t that right, Cap?”

That is not the Soldier’s designation. He nods anyway.

-

The Captain lives a bland life. He wakes up late, eats some uninspired breakfast, spends hours lying in bed with an open laptop, orders lunch, goes for a walk in the evening, comes home after dark, orders dinner, watches television on the couch, and falls asleep with it still running.

Some nights, he’ll wake up after midnight and relocate to his bedroom floor.

The walks are the only interesting part of his routine. They’re long and rambling, never the same route twice. He makes a stop at some small café or rundown diner to grab a snack. He never eats in, but sometimes, he sits down at park benches and watches people as he eats. He never talks to anyone, but he gets phone calls on these walks sometimes, and he always answers them. The Soldier doesn’t know who calls or what they talk about. He doesn’t dare get that close.

The Soldier learns this in one week. He makes a home for himself on the building’s roof and masters the art of clinging to the bricks so that he can peer in through the Captain’s windows. He wears a shifting range of civilian clothing that Rumlow provides him with as he stalks the Captain, and even with knives and guns stashed under the layers, he feels naked as he wades through Brooklyn’s crowds, just another face among thousands.

He looks at the data he has gathered and feels unhappy. It’s solid information, accurate and within mission parameters. But this Captain, who doesn’t cook and doesn’t sleep in his bed and doesn’t smile at strangers, he’s – something about him isn’t right.

Rumlow is unimpressed with his mission report.

“He ordered Thai for lunch, went to _The Green Bean_ – what the fuck even – for a snack, and ordered more Thai for dinner. That’s it. That’s all you’ve got for us?”

“It’s what I’ve observed.”

“Listen, Cap, Secretary Pierce doesn’t give a fuck what Barnes eats for lunch or if he eats lunch. Get closer. It’s a risk, him spotting you, but hell, with that hair and that thing growing on your face, you look enough like him to unsettle Barnes and still get away unrecognized. Get us some actual data. Is he in contact with the Widow, is Fury still trying to get him into S.H.I.E.L.D. Useful shit.”

So the Secretary’s name is Pierce.

“Yes, sir,” he says.

Rumlow huffs and rubs his sunken eyes. He’s got his own work keeping him up. A place he reports to every morning. Tomorrow, he’s set to go on a three-day mission of his own. Another handler will fill in.

Rumlow turns away, foolishly showing his back to the Soldier. He watches him retreat to the bedroom.

The Soldier rubs at his face, nails catching on the unkempt beard there. His hair’s down past his shoulders, held back by a tight knot at the base of his neck. He doesn’t remember his hair ever being different, but he knows the slick slide of a smooth jaw against his palm.

-

The new handler is scared of the Soldier. Unlike Rumlow, whose fear manifests in brash talk and pointless plays at dominance, this one gives the Soldier a wide berth and only talks to him when it’s time to report.

This suits the Soldier just fine. He’s starting to resent the time he has to spend with his handlers. The Captain, with his boring routines and predilection for Asian food, is infinitely more interesting.

Today, he had Lucky Charms for breakfast and saw something on his laptop that made the most comically horrifying expression cross his face. The Soldier didn’t laugh at the sight but some strange sound ended up trapped in his throat anyway. He followed slightly more closely than he usually did on the Captain’s evening stroll. It took them halfway across the borough and then back.

The Captain is enhanced. His file says so. The Soldier is also enhanced. Evidence says so.

He suspects he has more endurance than the Captain who’s soaked in sweat and visibly tired by the time he returns from his walks. The Soldier isn’t unaffected, but it is also no strain to spend the rest of the night without food or sleep to watch the Captain. The Soldier could take him in a fight, but the Captain’s entire left arm is made of metal that, according to his file, can punch through walls. This is a complication.

But he doesn’t have to fight the Captain yet. It doesn’t matter anyway. The Soldier always completes his mission. It’s what he was made for.

Tonight, the Captain enters his apartment and goes directly to his bedroom. The Soldier initiates the somewhat irritating process of shifting from the living room window to the bedroom window. Both have been left open today, likely to air out the apartment. He has yet to see the Captain pay any particular attention to the windows, save for hasty glances when the Soldier stares too long. He has never spotted the Soldier, and he never bothers to investigate.

The Captain doesn’t care much for his safety. He’s not scared of people like the ones holding the Soldier’s leash.

This rankles.

He returns to the living room window when the Captain exits the bathroom. He clings to the wall with his feet on the window-head and listens for the familiar sounds of dinner being called in.

Hours pass and nothing of the sort happens. The television is turned on and then off. There are no sounds of cooking in the kitchen. The Captain’s breathing is the only noise.

It’s nearing midnight when the Soldier decides to crouch on the window and take a look inside.

The sight that greets him is familiar – the Captain asleep on the couch, half-dressed and sprawled awkwardly. The couch is not big enough for a man of the Captain’s height. His back will ache when he wakes. He has heard the Captain grumble about it to himself when he shifts to the bedroom floor.

The Soldier has never entered the Captain’s home before. The window sills and rooftops have been his territory.

He lands inside silently. The Captain, snoring lightly several feet away, doesn’t even stir. The Soldier keeps an eye on him as he heads for the kitchen. There is no door between the living room and kitchen, but there is a wall that hides most of the latter from view when you enter the apartment. The Soldier is still cautious as he sulks in the shadows, surveying the cupboards and cabinets that are more likely to be empty than not. All the Captain seems to have is cereal.

The Soldier eyes the refrigerator.

Opening it presents a high likelihood of waking the Captain. But there are no other options.

He is careful as he sets about his self-imposed mission. The refrigerator door does make a wet, sucking sound when he opens it. The Captain snorts, and the Soldier holds very still, keeping the door open but not enough for it to light up. After a minute, the Captain resumes snoring.

The carton of milk is half-full. The sugar has been left out on the counter, sparing the Soldier some trouble. A glass is similarly easy to acquire.

He grimaces a little as he tastes the concoction he has made. It’s sweet enough to be cloying and perfect for the Captain.

The Soldier doesn’t know how he knows this. It wasn’t in the file.

Glass of milk in hand, he goes to wake the Captain.

It doesn’t take much effort. He looms over the Captain for three seconds, mind running through possible ways to wake him and avoid an altercation. The Soldier is confident in his ability to subdue the Captain, but the milk might be sacrificed in the fight. He would like to avoid that.

Perhaps he should have bound the Captain first and then offered him milk.

Before he can act on that thought, the Captain’s eyes flash open. He didn’t turn off the light in the living room before he slept, he never does, and thus, there’s no darkness to shelter the vivid blue of his eyes or the shock in his expression when he registers the Soldier’s presence.

The Soldier expects a startled scream or a knife at his face.

“Steve,” rasps the Captain’s sleep-thick voice. His metal hand reaches for the Soldier’s, but the body braced for a blow receives only strong fingers grasping the hip. “Steve.”

The Soldier blinks.

He thrusts the milk towards the Captain, taking care not to let it spill.

“Drink.”

His voice is gruff from disuse and tension. The word comes out as a barked command, the kind that makes STRIKE teams scamper out of his path and do as ordered with mingled terror and respect.

The Captain only blinks and heaves himself into an upright position. The Soldier tracks the movement but allows it. He’s pleased when the Captain curls his flesh hand around the glass, though the other one remains on the Soldier’s hip.

“Drink,” he repeats, trying to gentle his voice, an instinct that doesn’t strike him as odd until he has already followed it. Something about the Captain’s wet blue-grey eyes and rat’s nest hair prompts him to be soft.

The Captain drinks. He doesn’t take his eyes off the Soldier, not until he has swallowed the first mouthful. Then, his eyes grow wide and shocked. The tears gathering there spill delicately down his cheeks.

“Steve,” the Captain repeats, voice clearer than before for all that the name remains confusing. “No one makes this the way you did.”

“It’s milk, water, and sugar,” the Soldier says, unsettled by the tears and the Captain’s tone. He talks to the Soldier like he knows him, but he sounds like a wrecked man. “Drink.”

“You always said that,” the Captain says, marveling. He drains half the glass. “This is a nice dream.”

The Soldier doesn’t disabuse him of that rather nonsensical notion.

Instead, he waits for the Captain to finish his milk and then tugs him upright, oddly unsurprised when the Captain follows even the slightest suggestion of a touch, turning to the Soldier like a wilting flower seeks the sun. The Soldier doesn’t resist when the Captain tucks himself close into his body. He’s not a small man, the Captain. The file had pictures of him post-thaw, a lean figure on the bed, left arm gone and not yet replaced with Stark’s experimental prosthetic. He’s considerably bigger now. The file says he needed to gain more muscle tone to manage the weight of the arm, and he has, bulking up enough to almost dwarf the Soldier’s physique.

Yet, he burrows under the Soldier’s arm like he’s a tiny slip of a thing and clings to him like a child.

The Soldier doesn’t bristle at the proximity or push the Captain away to lessen the likelihood of an attack being effective. The Captain, with his face tucked into the Soldier’s neck, is in no state to attack. And deception is an option, but something inside the Soldier bristles when he considers it.

He's silent as he leads the Captain to his bedroom, almost dragging him. The Captain seems happy enough to be manhandled. He doesn’t protest until the Soldier tries to lay him on his bed and, in the process, pry the man away from himself.

The Soldier is confused by the man’s writhing struggles until dry lips suddenly and violently slam into his. He freezes, close-mouthed and stunned as the Captain tries clumsily to kiss him.

His lips, the Soldier discovers, are chapped but pleasantly plump.

The Captain ends the kiss, still clinging to the Soldier.

“Don’t go, Stevie,” the Captain whines. “You feel so real. Please don’t go.”

He still believes the Soldier to be a dream. He knows, in that familiar way that isn’t accompanied by concrete memories, that he has only been a nightmare to people and never the kind of dream you cling to. But here’s James Buchanan Barnes, the defrosted Captain America, clinging to the Winter Soldier like he’ll die if this ‘Steve’ lets go.

The Soldier has been worse things than a name uttered with such naked need.

“I won’t go,” he says, lowering Barnes to the bed and climbing in beside him. “Sleep.”

“Steve,” Barnes sighs again, a hiccupping sob in his voice. The Soldier guides his face to his neck, and Barnes goes sweetly, sniffling into the skin there and settling in. “Why do you have a beard?”

“Go to sleep,” the Soldier repeats.

He holds Barnes until he does, and all the while, he thinks of the way the man looked at him and called him a name that doesn’t belong to the Soldier. He has no name. He’s the Asset, the Fist of Hydra.

Rumlow told him to take care of the Captain. This isn’t what he meant, of that he is sure, but his mission parameters are flexible. He can be Steve for the mission, for Barnes.

-

His temporary handler gets more of the dull itinerary that frustrated Rumlow initially. The Soldier doesn’t mention the milk or Barnes’s grasping hands. He doesn’t mention the name Steve. In the two days following the Soldier’s liberal interpretation of mission parameters, Barnes eats his dinner so the Soldier has no cause to venture inside and make him drink milk. He doesn’t know why this is disappointing.

Barnes, for his part, seems to have truly believed the episode to be a dream. It likely didn’t help that the Soldier slipped from the bed once Barnes fell asleep and returned the milk, sugar, and glass to precisely where he found them.

He is a ghost, they told him once.

He remembers more the longer he is out. They think he cannot. He thinks he made them believe he cannot. It doesn’t matter. The chair and the ice are inevitable. And yet–

When Rumlow returns, he’s disgusted but not surprised to learn that the mission has not progressed in his absence.

“What the fuck was I expecting,” he snaps, stalking the room but giving the Soldier’s spot in one corner a wide berth. “I got taken off leading STRIKE Alpha to deal with you while you deal with Barnes.”

He stops and snorts, glaring at the Soldier. Rumlow’s one of the rare few that looks the Soldier in the eye. Technicians barely look at him at all, except at whatever body part they’re working on. Pierce is an outlier. The armed guard reeks of fear more often than not, with their fingers trembling on the trigger and their eyes trained on every twitch of his body.

But not Rumlow. He meets his eyes every time. The Soldier appreciates that even though he’d like to pluck out them out and crush them between thumb and forefinger.

“Elimination has not been authorized,” the Soldier tells him calmly.

Rumlow grimaces.

“Yeah, no shit. Whatever. This is still more intel than we had. Fine, you go back to your stalking routine. I’ve got real work to do, regimes to destabilize, you know the drill.”

Rumlow laughs at his own joke. The Soldier’s fingertips twitch.

-

The Avengers assemble on a fine Monday morning.

The Soldier is coiled in his customary spot on Barnes’s roof when it happens. Barnes’s phone blares to life with an unholy wail that is audible from even the roof and, judging from the sounds of cursing and at least one chair being knocked over, is no more pleasant with increased proximity.

After five seconds of tormenting all nearby ear drums, the thing cuts off with “AVENGERS ASSEMBLE” shouted in Barnes’s own voice.

“_Motherfucker_,” Barnes curses vehemently.

The Soldier’s phone, loaned to him for the mission and likely traced as zealously as the trackers they’ve injected inside his body, lights up with a message.

It’s Rumlow. The Avengers have been mobilized. Stolen alien tech in Manhattan, a bank being held hostage. He is to follow Captain America. He is not to interfere. Observe. Learn the way he fights.

The Soldier pockets the phone and vacates the roof.

He travels by rooftops until he’s a good mile away from Barnes’s apartment. Then he borrows a car and grimly settles into wading through New York traffic. He has to make a pot stop at one of the innocuous-looking Hydra bases scattered through the city, this one a florist’s shop. The fifty-something woman manning the place gives him a sweet smile and leads him to the backroom. Her smile doesn’t falter when a fake wall slides over to reveal a sizeable weapons cache.

“Hail Hydra,” she murmurs as he stalks past her.

Predictably, he does not beat Barnes to the scene. By the time the Soldier settles down with his rifle on the roof of a building opposite the bank, the fighting has turned earnest. There are only four on Barnes’s team. Banner and Thor from the files are nowhere to be seen, and a green rage monster and a flying thunder god can hardly be subtle.

Neither are any of the others, except the Widow. Barnes is a lurid sight in his stars and stripes, flinging a shield that’s as blatant a target as anything the Soldier has ever seen. Stark’s red and gold is no less sore on the eyes. Hawkeye, with his subdued purple and black would have earned a pass except that he’s fighting in close quarters with a bow and arrows.

Barnes, the Soldier decides summarily, is an idiot. His teammates are all also idiots.

Barnes is fighting three men at the same time. The others are equally occupied. They are outnumbered, though likely not unmatched.

He is not to interfere.

If Barnes were to die here, that’s to Hydra’s advantage. It is public and the culprits clear. The Avengers’ and the public’s rage would have a safe, suitable direction. The Soldier would not interfere.

Steve would. The Soldier doesn’t know how he knows this, but he does. Steve would interfere, and he decided, didn’t he, that he would be Steve for Barnes?

None of the Avengers notice the lanky masked man rising with gun in hand from behind a pile of debris. Barnes, having dispatched of two of his original opponents, now have four to handle.

Steve shoots.

The masked man falls, shot clean through the head.

It’s as natural as it is reckless to keep on shooting until Barnes is standing in a circle of black-clad corpses, his confusion evident even with the distance and the garish mask covering half his face.

Something about this feels terribly familiar.

And _wrong_.

Barnes is looking right at Steve, and he can’t possibly see him clearly at such a distance, can’t make out more than yet another figure in black, but Steve ducks down anyway, flattening himself on the roof. When he peeks again, Barnes is occupied with a couple of the hostiles, but the fighting is clearly dying down. The Avengers have wrested most of the vaporizing weapons from the masked robbers, and the few who’re still upright seem more focused on escape than the fight.

Barnes keeps glancing at the rooftop in between blows. It’s making him sloppy, enough to have caused him serious damage if not for his serum and how genuinely good a fighter he is.

Steve should hide again, but he can’t, mesmerized by the sight of Barnes’s graceful violence and distracted by the thought that, somehow, this is wrong. It shouldn’t Barnes down there throwing around a glorified frisbee. It shouldn’t be Steve perched with a rifle on this roof.

It shouldn’t–

The Widow notices first. She shouts a warning, but it’s too late. The gun – normal, not alien tech – goes off, and Barnes goes down hard, hand clutched over his gut.

“Bucky!”

It takes Steve a second to realize that it was his mouth that screamed that name.

The Widow tackles the culprit, but the damage is done. The fight is over. Steve has to leave.

The Soldier has to leave. He disassembles his rifles and is off the roof in less than a minute, leaping across rooftops and running headlong down narrow alleys as he scrambles to get back to base.

All the while, a single thought echoes in his head–

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

-

It’s his fault, the Soldier decides, waiting like a chastised dog for Rumlow to return.

Barnes got shot because he was looking over at Ste – the Soldier’s rooftop, trying to catch a glimpse of the sniper who shouldn’t have been there. With any luck, the Avengers will chalk it up to S.H.I.E.L.D having sent back-up, but that won’t last past an actual debrief with S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Soldier will be punished. Maybe the wipe. Not the ice, probably. A beating, perhaps.

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. Barnes is injured. A GSW to the abdomen is dangerous. The Soldier doesn’t have enough intel on Barnes’s serum to know fast he will heal and how thoroughly he will recover. S.H.I.E.L.D doesn’t have the intel, and by extension, neither does Hydra.

The thought burns through the Soldier’s blood, and it’s long, long time before he realizes it’s rage.

Rumlow doesn’t return. The Soldier’s phone doesn’t ping. He is not authorized to reach out to handlers unless prior permission has been granted or there is an emergency. His aching need to know whether Barnes survived is neither. So he waits, stalking a groove through the floor. He waits until it’s night and two hours past when Rumlow should have returned.

And then he stops waiting.

-

The lights in Barnes’s apartment are on. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Barnes is in. He shouldn’t be, not when he should be laid out in a hospital bed somewhere. Maybe it’s one of Barnes’s teammates, coming to fetch his stuff. Maybe Barnes is inside because the serum healed him enough for discharge but has a friend with him, never mind that not a single soul has come over in the weeks the Soldier spent watching Barnes. The three days Barnes wasn’t home was spent at Avengers Tower, the building too secure for the Soldier to attempt breaching.

The Soldier – is he Steve, now? – crouches on the rooftop for close to an hour, listening intently for any sound from within the apartment. He knows very well from past experience that his enhanced hearing can pick out most sounds from inside.

But there’s nothing. No television, no footsteps, no voices, _nothing_.

Steve grits his teeth and climbs down the wall, gratified and piqued to find the window open. It makes Steve’s life easier, but Barnes should display more caution, being a man who got attacked by alien guns and shot by a human one in the span of an hour.

Steve can’t say he’s very surprised to find the Captain passed out on the couch. He’s dressed in nothing but sweatpants and wound dressings. His face looks pained even in his sleep.

Steve leans down for a closer look. There’s no blood seeping in through the bandages, which is a good sign. Steve can’t help dragging his eyes up the swathes of bared skin. He takes in defined pectorals, dusky pink nipples, prominent collarbones, and a neck that’s arched awkwardly. Barnes has an interesting face – a cleft chin that’s oddly endearing and those plush, slightly bowed lips. Steve licks his lips and remembers the brief pressure of them against his own.

He doesn’t remember kissing anyone, but he knows he has. He feels like he knows the shape of Barnes’s mouth.

He looks away hastily before he does anything even more unwise. Barnes has a nice nose that doesn’t bear the mark of at least one severe break like Steve’s. His lashes are long, obscenely so, brushing the pale skin under his eyes before they drift away to reveal gleaming eyes that can’t quite decide whether they’re blue or grey.

Eyes which are open and staring right into Steve’s.

“I knew it,” Barnes whispers, and his voice is a wreck but it rings true. “I knew it was you.”

Steve lurches back, Barnes’s shocked gaze inducing the kind of panic Hydra beat out of him a long time ago. But he has to stop because Barnes, with goddamn gut wound that’s not even a day old, tries to scramble off the couch to follow Steve and collapses to his knees with a pained cry. But he still reaches out, metal hand gripping Steve’s pants while his right hand curls protectively over his stomach.

“Don’t leave, please don’t leave, Steve, please,” Barnes is whispering under his breath, hushed and frantic, looking up at Steve with wide, imploring eyes. Lines of pain are sunken into his face, but Barnes ignores his injury in favor of begging Steve to stay.

Steve’s helpless not to step forward. He drops down to his knees, and it’s a risk but not the stupidest one he’s taken today, and anyway, it looks like attacking him is the last thing on Barnes’s mind. He’s still clutching at Steve like he’ll die if he lets go, but there’s only desperation in that grip, not danger.

“I won’t leave,” Steve says uncertainly.

Barnes shakes his head and curls his fingers in tighter.

“You left last time.” It should be an accusation, but it comes out plaintive, almost heartbroken. “I was so sure you were a dream, but I kept thinking – I–”

“Ssh,” Steve says, somewhat surprised to find his own hands rising to pet along Barnes’s face, easing his frown and stroking his hair. It’s the most natural thing in the world to card his fingers through those short, brown stands and lean in until their foreheads are gently pressed together. Steve doesn’t know what he’s going to say when he opens his mouth, but the words spill forth of their own accord. “I’m here. It’s okay.”

Barnes whimpers.

Steve pulls back, reminded harshly of Barnes’s injury. At first glance, there’s no blood seeping through the bandages. Barnes easily allows Steve to tug his arm away and expose the dressings, exposing his wounded belly to a predator without the slightest ounce of caution.

Steve revisits his evaluation on the rooftop, that Barnes and his cohorts are all idiots, and doubles down on it with a grumble.

“Can you walk? We need to redo this.”

Barnes, who was apparently busy staring adoringly at Steve’s face, just blinks, nonplussed.

Steve gives it up as a lost cause and gathers Barnes into his arms as carefully as he can. It’s an awkward task. The Soldier wasn’t trained in gentleness, and however much he tells himself he can be ‘Steve’ here, there’s something about wrangling his hulking body into this tender hold that feels raw and unfamiliar but precious at the same time.

Barnes doesn’t put up even a token resistance. Maybe he doesn’t know what the Soldier is any more than the Soldier knows why Barnes calls him Steve. There is a story here his half-blank mind isn’t privy to. The awareness of that weighs heavily on the Soldier, _Steve_, as he heads to the bedroom with Barnes held delicately in his arms.

“Last time you did this, I threw a fit,” Barnes says fondly. He sounds very tired and very awake. “Wasn’t used to the role reversal is all. I still maintain I fared better than you did the one time I tried to do it, back when you were a bony weed. At least I didn’t squirm and kick until you had to drop me.”

“You left bruises on my arms that lasted half a day,” Steve says absently, shouldering the bedroom door open.

He freezes with one foot inside and looks down at Barnes who’s smiling like there’s nothing odd about what Steve just said.

“I don’t know why I said that,” he says, a little horrified. “I don’t know this. I don’t know you.”

But he can feel the phantom sensation of Barnes, almost skin and bones in Steve’s arms as he shouted exceptionally foul words into Steve’s ear and clung tightly to his shoulders.

Steve isn’t surprised when Barnes says, “You do know me.”

Barnes was frozen in the 40s. Steve has been frozen on and off again for as long as he can remember and probably long before that. In this business, there are no such things as coincidences.

He says nothing as he carries Barnes to bed.

“Where’s your medkit?” he asks, forestalling another bout of Barnes protesting his departure. The answer is a hand pointed wordlessly towards the bathroom. Sure enough, there’s a kit in the cabinet under the sink. It’s well-stocked and untouched.

Barnes is propped up on his elbows when Steve emerges from the bathroom, clearly having been staring intently after him. The strain of the position is evident on his face, and when Steve looks at his midriff, he again expects to see red dotting the bandages. He doesn’t, though, and the rush of relief at this roots him to his spot for a moment.

“Steve?” Barnes calls, hopeful and pitiful and a thousand other things.

Steve says nothing but he climbs on the bed, settling himself and the kit beside Barnes who watches him placidly, but with an expression that says he thinks he might still be dreaming. It’s likely the calmest one has ever been with an assassin in his bed. Steve feels both furious and fond, and it’s confusing enough that he pushes those feelings aside and turns to Barnes’s injury.

His medical training isn’t extensive. Some information is there in his head, basic aid and the like. The Soldier is to prioritize self-preservation in the event of considerable harm. Missions failure can be tolerated, though not without punishment, but Hydra cannot lose their Asset.

Steve shakes off those thoughts and sets about unwrapping Barnes’s dressings.

“What are you doing?”

“Take a wild guess, Barnes.”

Barnes makes a gutted sound, and Steve freezes, afraid he has messed up and hurt him somehow. Barnes expression is pained, but he’s not looking at his wound or Steve’s hands on it but at Steve’s face, blue eyes bruised.

“What?” Steve snaps, almost defensively.

“You call me Bucky,” Barnes says. “You’ve only ever – you gave me that name, when you were six and tripping over James Buchanan because you heard my ma call me that when she was pissed and tried to imitate her – you really don’t remember.”

Barnes voice goes quiet at the end. Steve mouths _Bucky_ to himself, the shape of it familiar from that frantic scream at the rooftop.

“I don’t,” he says. “But I know that name. I know you.”

He can’t stop it from being an accusation.

Barnes – _Bucky_ – doesn’t seem to care, hearts in his eyes as he reaches for Steve. From anyone else, the gesture would make Steve flinch away or break every damn bone in their hand, but the lack of aggression in Bucky’s behavior towards him is made all the more conspicuous by how his whole body is a thing of violence the same way Steve’s is. He should still be cautious, but that ship set sail quite a while ago.

Steve doesn’t lean into the hand that cups his cheek but he doesn’t pull away either. Gentle touch is a strange thing even now. Giving and being given that still leaves him uncertain and vaguely unsettled, the latter caused by a dissonance he can’t pinpoint. Like these things should be familiar but aren’t and haven’t been in a long time.

He tilts his face away eventually, returning his attention to Bucky’s wound.

The dressings finally peel away, revealing puckered skin that doesn’t bleed but oozes some viscous fluid. It has healed for the most part. The sight wouldn’t be out of place in Steve’s own body, but on Bucky, it makes him stare.

“You should have been in a hospital.”

“I was,” Bucky says quietly. The hand that was holding Steve’s face now rests on his chest, fingers twitching now and then. “Stark Tower’s med-wing at least. I insisted on leaving. Natasha drove me here. She offered to stay, but I told her not to.”

“Tony Stark. Iron Man. And Natalia Romanova, the Black Widow.” Steve takes out what he needs from the kit but pauses to shoot Bucky an unimpressed glance. “You have dangerous friends. You should have let her stay.”

“Why?”

“So someone like me won’t kill you in your sleep.”

“Hey,” Bucky protests mildly. “I’d wake up before that.”

“You’d still die.”

Steve’s not as gentle as he can be as he redresses the wound. Bucky doesn’t make a single word of complaint, and Steve doesn’t need to look to know he’s being watched. It rankles that Barnes is just letting him do this with no concern for his own fucking safety, just like he told the Widow not to stay over because–

Because why, exactly?

It’s probably a bad idea to ask, but he does.

“Because of you,” comes the instantaneous response. “I had a feeling you’d show up. At least, if I was alone…”

“Until today, you thought I was a dream,” Steve counters.

Bucky’s smile is almost serene.

“Maybe I just wanted to dream.”

Steve doesn’t know what he can say to that. He turns back to the dressing, almost done now. He’s worried that it’s too tight. Bucky doesn’t seem to be in pain or uncomfortable, but that’s hardly a reliable measurement given how out of it he seems to be in general. Steve fusses over it until he’s satisfied.

He will never know what possesses him to bend down and press his mouth to the sharp jut of a hipbone.

He hears Bucky’s harsh intake of breath, but most of his attention is arrested by the warmth of the skin under his lips and the hard curve of a bone that, for some reason, makes him ache to set his teeth against it. He’s been a slave to confounding, nonsensical instincts since he ever set eyes on James Buchanan Barnes, and it’s no different now.

He bites down hard enough to leave a mark that will linger even with Bucky’s enhanced healing. The only reaction he elicits is a long, ragged moan, and when Steve reluctantly releases his mouthful and raises his head, he finds Barnes staring at him with wide, dark eyes and flushed cheeks.

“Steve.”

His breath stutters on the name, and something about that, too, is both familiar and appealing.

Steve doesn’t fight the impulse that finds him crawling closer to Bucky’s face. He doesn’t lie down on the bed, not quite, but his half-sprawl isn’t a tactically sound position either.

Bucky reaches for him with a fervor that has become predictable by now. Steve surprises himself by returning it in kind.

The kiss they sink into is clumsy and questioning. Steve’s mouth seems to know what to do, but he can’t remember kissing anyone, and the two combine awkwardly. It helps, a little, that Bucky seems similarly disoriented, pulling back every other breath like he wants to speak but rushing in the next moment, mouth open and hungry against Steve’s.

When they break apart, Bucky’s flushed down to his chest and Steve’s heart is racing like he’s sparred with an entire STRIKE team.

He doesn’t let Bucky go far. He curls his fingers around his jaw, watching the soft skin dent at his touch. When Steve speaks, his voice rings with helpless anger.

“Who are you? Why do I know you?” And then, lower, rougher, “Who am I?”

“Steve,” Bucky says, equally helpless. “You’re Steven Grant Rogers. You’re Captain America.”

-

“This is unnecessary,” Steve grumbles as Bucky holds an ice-pack to his temple. Bucky ignores him and continues dabbing the thing at the slight swelling, unbearably careful as if the sting of cloth-wrapped ice cubes will be Steve’s undoing when thousand feet of snow-capped mountains and grenades have failed.

The former of those is a freshly recovered memory. Flashes of white and blue surged to life in his mind so violently at Bucky’s proclamation that Steve flung himself back with enough force to tumble off the bed and slam his head into a corner of the nightstand.

His pride is more bruised than his head, but if he didn’t get the ice, Bucky would have, his own healing wound be damned.

It’s still unnecessary, the two of them on the couch, Bucky holding the ice to Steve’s head like he doesn’t trust him to do it himself. It’s infuriating. He never wants to leave.

“You believe me now?” Bucky asks, nodding at the phone in Steve’s hand.

The screen is still lit up. The black-and-white visage of one Steven Grant Rogers, 1917-1944, fills the screen. Even with shorter hair, a shaved jaw, and a smile unlike anything he can imagine on his own face, Rogers is clearly the Soldier.

_Steve_, he reminds himself, wrenching his mind away from old, ingrained habits. The name is his beyond Bucky’s misplaced fancy, regardless of whether or not he can reconcile himself to the man on the screen. A bare two minutes of reading told Steve enough. Steve Rogers, the first and original Captain America, was a hero.

The Soldier wasn’t, isn’t.

“This man died on that mountain,” is all Steve says. “You’re better off not trying to find him in me.”

Bucky finally sets the ice aside, but he doesn’t move away. He inches closer, in fact, touching Steve’s long hair and beard with cold, hesitant fingers. Steve sits still for him, watching Bucky out of the corner of his eyes.

At least, now he knows why some part of him trusts this man, why his body is so familiar with his body.

“I don’t know how you’re here,” Bucky says after a while. “And I don’t _care_, Steve. All that matters is that you came back to me.”

“You should care,” Steve says gently, turning to face Bucky. “According to this, Steve Rogers died trying to stop Hydra. And pal, I can tell you they ain’t gone.”

Something about those word make him blink. But then his focus is drawn to Bucky’s pale face and slack jaw.

“What?”

“Hydra made me out of what was left of your lover. I’m theirs, do you understand? I’m not Captain America, I am the Winter Soldier.”

Bucky’s shaking his head, and Steve recognizes the instinctive denial born out of sheer horror. He brackets Bucky’s face in his hands and yanks him forward, staring into his eyes and forcing him to look back.

“Hydra is active. And they want you. You’re not safe. You shouldn’t be walking out of medical care with healing bullet wounds, and you shouldn’t be staying alone in an apartment where anyone can come in and fucking kill you.”

There’s a long pause.

“It was a flesh wound,” Bucky says. “Okay, maybe it nicked something, but the serum took care of that before I was even at the hospital. They had to reopen it a bit to dig it out. I’m fine.”

Steve growls.

“Woah.” Bucky’s face is pink again, his eyes a little glazed. Steve doesn’t think it’s from pain. “Don’t, uh, worry. This apartment is pretty secure. People have tried to get me here before. No one succeeded.”

“I did,” Steve says scathingly.

Bucky’s smile is wide and dopey.

“You wouldn’t hurt me, Steve.”

Steve opens his mouth but finds there’s not much he can say to counter that. He made the man drink shitty milk and clumsily dressed his wound, but neither of those quite counts as premediated murder.

“I was sent here to,” he says. “And when they know I have failed, they can and will send others.”

Even as he says it, even as the only solution makes itself known, there’s part of Steve, of the Soldier, who rejects his vehemently. Bucky, unaware, just looks at him with blue eyes wide with trust and – and love.

No one has looked at the Soldier and felt love, but Steve knows this look, these eyes.

“I’ll be careful,” Bucky promises, but the words ring false.

Steve looks away from those too-open eyes. Bucky’s still naked down to his waist, covered only in the bandages. Steve’s gaze is drawn to his left shoulder and the gleaming metal there. There are scars too, red and raised, branching out from where metal meets skin.

He thumbs the scar tissue and, when Bucky doesn’t react save for a shuddering exhale, he touches him more firmly, tracing and retracing the path of the scars, then sliding his palm down the whole metal limb. Bucky slots his fingers in between Steve’s gloved ones, gleaming silver linked with porous black.

“This is new,” Steve says, quiet but sure.

“Yeah.” Bucky doesn’t look him in the eye this time. “When I crashed the plane, my arm, it – I don’t remember much. I blacked out pretty fast after the pain hit. When they thawed me – well, my heart still beating was enough of a miracle. Guess it would have been too much for my arm to survive too, half-severed like that.”

Steve doesn’t understand the noise he makes. But it makes Bucky’s head snap up, horror twisting his expression before it turns into concern.

“No, hey, no. I’m okay. C’mon, Stark made this bitchass arm. Like the stuff I used to read about and rant at you, see?” Bucky’s half-smile falters and fades when Steve just looks blankly at him. “You don’t remember that, do you? Steve, sweetheart – what did they do to you?”

There’s a file on Steve too, buried somewhere. Maybe it’s still back in Russia, at the place where he was born, the place that only exists in his memories as flashes of snow and cold, grey walls. That file could tell Bucky everything better than Steve and the conspicuous gaps in his mind.

But Bucky’s looking at him with like his heart’s breaking and healing at the same time, and Steve thinks that maybe, it will be kinder for him to hear of the rivers of blood while holding onto the hand that spilled it all, so he can decide then and there whether he wants to let go. Whichever he chooses, Steve knows what he has to do.

So he tells him.

Bucky doesn’t let go, not once.

-

Going rogue, when it comes down to it, isn’t a choice.

It just is.

Bucky’s the one who’s agitated, almost vibrating as he tries – and fails – for the fifth time to convince Steve to let him come along.

“–don’t know what he knows, maybe they’ll be prepared, you said they can track you, Steve. You don’t want me to call the others in, fine, but let me come along, come on, pal, it’s dangerous to–”

“Bucky,” Steve says, low and firm, “_stop_.”

Bucky stops though it costs him visible effort to do so.

“Steve–”

“Do you trust me?” Steve asks.

It’s not a fair question. No one in their right mind should trust Steve.

Bucky doesn’t even hesitate.

“Yes.”

That gives Steve pause. His next question sticks in his throat a little.

“Can I trust you?”

Bucky’s mouth wobbles. His eyes are still red-rimmed from earlier, when silent tears were his only reaction to Steve’s bland recital of how the Winter Soldier came to be.

“Yes. I’d die before I fail you again, Steve.”

“You never failed me to begin with,” Steve points out, frowning.

Bucky shakes his head.

“It should have been me,” he says with a terrible grimace. “I was going to fall. You saved me, but then you – it should have been me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Steve snaps. The anger in his voice surprises him, and Bucky starts too. “Your Captain wanted to protect you. Allow him the dignity of his choice.”

Steve knows all about the dignity of a choice; rather, he knows how it feels not to have it. He doesn’t remember being Steve Rogers, not really. But he knows enough to be certain of this much.

Bucky just stares at him. Steve doesn’t know why he kisses him, only that he wants to wipe that stricken look off Bucky’s face and also taste him again, just in case Bucky turns out to be right and this really is the end.

They end up kneeling on the floor, Steve’s hand wandering hungrily over Bucky’s bared skin. He’s careful over the dressings but grabs fistfuls of his pecs just to hear Bucky groan and rakes nails down his back to get him shuddering against Steve. Bucky’s fingers scramble for purchase in Steve’s tac gear, but in the end sink into his hair and cling for dear life as they kiss like this is goodbye all over again.

Steve doesn’t remember kissing him goodbye the first time, but he knows it happened in another lifetime.

He breaks the kiss abruptly and stands, leaving Bucky red-faced and startled on the ground. Steve finds what he needs in a diary and pen lying on the coffee table. He rips off half a page and scribbles on it. He folds the sheet twice before turning back to Bucky, who’s back on his feet and frowning confusedly at Steve.

Steve cups his face with one hand and pulls him into another kiss. Bucky kisses back and his fingers close reflexively around the paper Steve pushes into his palm.

“Five hours,” Steve says.

“What?”

“Give me five hours. If I’m not back after that, go to these addresses Hit ‘em fast and hard. Call in the Avengers. I don’t trust them, but you can’t go in alone.”

“I – Jesus, Steve–”

“And Bucky?”

“Yeah?”

Steve looks him in the eye and thinks, fleetingly, of trust.

“Do not involve S.H.I.E.L.D. Secretary Pierce is a head of Hydra.”

-

Rumlow is back when Steve returns to base. He’s waiting for Steve. He doesn’t make an inviting sight with his aggressive stance and stormy expression, but he doesn’t have a gun trained on the door and doesn’t reach for one when Steve walks into view, and that’s telling on its own.

“Soldier, where the hell were you, and what the fucking fuck did you pull–”

Steve slits his throat before he can finish speaking.

Rumlow makes a mess when he dies, blood frothing at his mouth and gushing through his neck. He looks a little surprised even as he lies there and bleeds out.

Steve finds Rumlow’s phone on the couch, thrown there carelessly. A dead man’s fingerprint is just as good a password as a live one’s, and it’s a matter of minutes to reconfigure the phone so that Steve’s thumb will open it. He finds the innocuous-looking app that opens to send encrypted messages to Hydra, the password to it one of the things that was in Steve’s brain when he woke.

Rumlow sends progress reports once every week, at intervals that seem random at first glance but aren’t because Hydra’s all about order, isn’t it?

It will be easy enough to replicate.

Steve abandons the phone and heads to the bathroom. Digging out the trackers isn’t pleasant work, but at least it’s simple. There are five of them in total – two in his thighs, one on each arm, and one in his neck.

He sits in the empty bathtub until the wounds stop bleeding and clot up. Then, he showers off the blood, throws the trackers into a zip-lock, and stashes them in a kitchen cabinet. Rumlow’s phone will not let him fool them forever, but by the time Hydra suspects something and comes looking for him, the location of the trackers won’t matter much as long as they’re not inside him.

He makes it back to Bucky with time to spare.

He doesn’t go in through the front door, aware of the camera Hydra has strained on the building. He can hear Bucky pacing as he lets himself in through the bedroom window, and he allows himself to be noisier than usual, just so Bucky will know he’s here.

They collide at the bedroom doorway, and Steve keeps walking forward, sinking hungrily into a kiss.

“You’re back,” Bucky gasps between one messy kiss and the next, and Steve hums an assent before licking into Bucky’s mouth, ravenous for the taste of him now he’s had it.

They have to part eventually, Bucky sliding his hands between their bodies and pushing at Steve’s chest with enough force to actually move him.

“What – what happened?” Bucky pants, and Steve wants nothing more than to reel him in and give in to certain new impulses that are awakening in his body, but he curls his hands into fists at his side and tries to focus.

“I killed Rumlow, got rid of the subdermal trackers. It’ll buy us time.”

Bucky takes a deep breath.

“Right. Hydra. S.H.I.E.L.D, _fuck_. You ran off before explaining that but, damn it, Steve, Pierce is – that man’s powerful. And if he’s Hydra, then who else…?”

He trails off, looking expectantly at Steve.

“Most world governments have Hydra plants in positions of power,” Steve tells him blandly. “I don’t know the details. It’s not my place. But they let information slip when I’m in the room because they know it will be wiped sooner or later.”

Bucky swears a blue streak. Steve patiently waits for him to finish.

“Pierce mentioned something called Insight. I don’t know what it is, but if it takes off, it would have made Hydra bold enough to kill you, Captain America, in plain sight, without bothering with the kind of surveillance I’ve been assigned to.”

Bucky’s oddly beautiful when he’s incandescent with anger.

Taken as he is by the sight, Steve doesn’t quite register what Bucky is saying, not at first. When he does, his whole body goes cold.

“No.”

-

_Compromise_, says one internet forum, _is the crux of a successful marriage_.

Maybe it’s true, but Steve’s not married to Bucky. He wouldn’t be opposed. Bucky’s pretty and kind and he looks at Steve like he’s the only thing in the world and makes him feel, in turn, like Bucky’s the only thing in the world. He can’t cook for shit, and neither can Steve, but that’s what food delivery is for.

Point is that, marriage or not, they’re comprising already.

“I still maintain this is unnecessary,” Steve says as he sits on the couch and idly flips a knife, resolutely ignoring Bucky’s pacing.

“Fuck’s sake, pal,” Bucky snaps, “we can’t take on Hydra between just the two of us.”

Steve looks up and catches Bucky’s eyes.

“You don’t have to come,” he says coolly.

Bucky’s expression crumples. He’s kneeling by the couch in a flash, tugging the knife out of Steve’s grasp and setting it aside so Bucky can hold both of his hands.

“Baby, please. It’s dangerous. I don’t – I can’t lose you again. I get why you don’t want to trust the others, but Nat’s solid, okay? She wouldn’t – fuck, she’s not Hydra. She can’t be.”

“She’s a Widow,” Steve points our reasonably but most of his irritation has already melted away. Bucky’s concern is strange and hard to get used to, but it’s not so bad to have someone want to protect him. Looking into Bucky’s beautiful eyes, Steve can even understand the impulse, irrational as it is, because he feels the same for Bucky. “It’s okay. If she turns out to be a traitor, I’ll kill her.”

Bucky grimaces but coaxes the expression into an unconvincing smile.

“It won’t come to that.”

It’s another twenty minutes before the Widow arrives. Steve spends that time making out with Bucky’s neck and discovering all the spots that make him squirm and gasp and make the sweetest, filthiest sounds. When Bucky goes to open the door, he’s red and dazed and marked all over. Steve watches him go, satisfied but not sated.

The Widow’s a brunette today. Her gaze immediately falls on Steve and freezes.

“Hail Hydra,” he greets.

She has a gun pointed at his head in a matter of seconds, but then, so does he.

Bucky, predictably, jumps in between them.

“Steve, Natasha, _put your fucking guns down_.”

Steve does because it’s Bucky asking, and he’s pretty sure he can kill the Widow even after she takes a shot at him. Her reaction to him was to pull a weapon on him rather than echo the words, and it’s no guarantee that she’s not one of them, but it’s something.

“Barnes,” the Widow says very pleasantly, “what the fuck?”

“Gun _down_, Nat,” Bucky snaps. “I warned you.”

“You told me the situation was critical, not that you had the Winter fucking Soldier in your house.”

“Do I know you?” Steve asks.

Bucky steps to the side. The Widow does have her gun down, but for some reason, she seems to be lifting her top. Steve blinks at ragged scar that forms a grotesque smile on her belly, clear evidence of someone trying to gut her, and meets her clear, steady gaze.

“I assume I gave you that.”

“I assume you don’t remember,” she returns evenly.

All things considered, it’s not the worst first meeting they could have had, mostly because it’s apparently not a first meeting at all.

-

Bucky returns to pacing as he and Steve – mostly Steve – tell Natasha what they can. Steve tries to ignore it, intent on her expressions. Everything he says seems to be new information to her, but again, she’s the sole surviving Black Widow. And Bucky’s not helping, stalking across the room like a caged kitten.

Steve talks calmly to Natasha, waits until Bucky’s with arm’s reach, darts out a hand to grab him, and pulls him into his lap.

Bucky crashes into him with a yelp, but Steve muffles it with his mouth, pleased beyond words when the furious tension in Bucky’s limbs turns into a wholly different kind of tension as Steve nips at his lips and licks into the sweet heat of his mouth.

He has to break the kiss, eventually, but he keeps Bucky in his lap, rearranging his bulk so he’s tucked under Steve’s chin, all his nervous energy contained into a pleasantly crushing hug. Steve can hold him and still watch Natasha, and it’s ideal, really.

He tenses when he sees that she’s got her gun out. But it’s pointed at the floor, and her eyes are wide with shock as she stares at them.

“Huh,” she says eventually. “Look at that.”

Bucky makes an odd noise low in his throat, but when Steve looks at him, he’s smiling. He shrugs and continues telling Natasha what Pierce said and where the bank is.

In the end, she also calls for the Avengers to mobilize.

Steve tries to grumble, but Bucky kisses him quiet.

-

Steve remembers Rumlow’s comments on Tony Stark’s AI. The fear turns out to be entirely justified as the somewhat unsettling JARVIS executes an alarmingly brief bout of cyber-warfare with the Hydra servers hidden sever layers deep within S.H.I.E.L.D.

Bucky’s the one who tells Steve this, once the two of them, the Widow, and Hawkeye are already en route to the bank in D.C.

“Good,” says Steve and inches closer so he’s more or less in Bucky’s lap.

Bucky makes the most hilarious squeak when Steve kisses him in front of God and teammates and all, but it’s nothing Romanoff hasn’t already seen, and a sniper who thinks arrows make adequate weapons has no business commenting on Steve’s sex life. Granted, Hawkeye’s skill with his bow justifies a lot of shit, but Bucky’s red-white-blue is growing on Steve, and he couldn’t keep his hands off if he tried. Not that Bucky minds, melting into the kiss and opening up for Steve with a sigh that makes his heart tremble.

-

They’re waiting for them at the bank.

Steve can _hear_ the chair from the elevator, and his hair stands on end at the buzzing. He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until Bucky grabs his hand and shoots him a concerned glance.

“The chair,” is all Steve can say, and Bucky’s resplendent in his rage.

The tear through the first wave of guards like it’s nothing. Bucky throws Steve the shield, and he doesn’t think twice about catching and flinging it at their enemies. It’s only when it bounces off three agents’ heads and two walls and returns to his hand that Steve realizes how natural it feels to wield it.

Bucky’s grinning at him, wild and knowing, and the expression doesn’t falter when Steve throws the shield back at him.

They fight together like a well-oiled machine, two parts of a broken whole.

Steve punches through a man’s chest when he tries to get to Bucky, and Bucky damn near decapitates someone with the shield in defense of Steve. It’s not romantic as defined any of the websites Steve browsed in a hasty attempt to understand his own tumultuous feelings for Bucky, but it suits them more than bouquets of flowers or candlelight dinners.

Pierce is waiting beside the chair, and there’s no fear on his face.

He speaks, but Steve shoots him in the gut before the words can reach his ear.

There are words, he remembers as he watches the Secretary’s impeccable suit is stained with his own life, that can strip him off himself more thoroughly than the chair or cryo. But Karpov didn’t deign to hand them over to the Americans he so despised. Steve’s mind his is own, for now.

Bucky takes his hand as they stand in a room surrounded by the dead and the dying, and Steve thinks that even if this all goes to hell and he vanishes for good into some dark crevice in the Soldier’s mind, it still would have been worth it, just for this.

-

Tony Stark unsettles him.

Steve can’t put a finger on why. It’s something about his face, his name. It doesn’t bring forth memories, not the flashes of color from Steve Rogers’s past or the grey, smudged lines of things the chair took after each mission. But there’s something.

Steve puts it out of his mind because his tension is drawing Bucky’s concern and caution, and Steve can tell he’s five seconds away from saying to hell with it and postponing this meeting for another time. Steve wouldn’t exactly be opposed to that. He refused point-blank to interact with what was left of S.H.I.E.L.D after information about its Hydra infiltrators was released into the internet. Bucky wasn’t keen on the idea either, and Romanoff, who suggested it, seemed to have expected the answer.

Besides, S.H.I.E.L.D is a little busy extracting information from the Hydra plants they caught instead of killed while simultaneously mitigating the damage from the proposed Project Insight. It’s a mess and a half, and Steve wants nothing to do with it.

All he wants, really, is to drag Bucky into bed and act out some of his recently surfaced memories. Bucky doesn’t seem opposed to the idea, what with the way he goes heavy-lidded and sweet whenever Steve puts his hands or mouth on him, but Romanoff and Barton insisted on a debrief before they fucked off to Bucky’s floor on Avengers Tower.

‘Debrief’ doesn’t take long to turn into biteless banter between a round table of too-strong personalities.

Steve ignores the way Stark makes him twitch and focuses on the conversation, entertained despite himself. He’s the only silent party. Banner, who opted out of fighting Hydra but was involved in the planning, occasionally pipes in with snarky quips but mostly keeps quiet. They catch each other’s eyes at one point. The moment of understanding is odd but not unpleasant.

But soon enough, Steve’s attention returns to Bucky and sticks on him. They’re on adjacent chairs, but it’s still too far for Steve. Bucky doesn’t notice Steve leaving the chair, caught up in an exchange with Stark that’s making him grin and scowl in turn, but he certainly notices when Steve folds himself onto his lap.

Conversation stutters to a halt. Steve can feel four sets of eyes bore into him, but he only has eyes for Bucky who’s staring up at him with wide eyes. That tint of red on his cheeks is near permanent now.

“Continue,” Steve allows graciously. “I’ll just–”

He buries his face in Bucky’s neck, inhaling his scent and nuzzling into that spot that makes him shiver. Bucky lets out the faintest of gasps and clutches Steve tight to him.

“Cute murderkitten you’ve got, Sarge,” Stark says, breaking the silence.

“Fuck you, Tony,” Bucky says, slightly breathless.

For some reason, the meeting doesn’t last long after that.

-

“Are you sure about this?” Bucky asks.

Steve pauses and ever so gently lets Bucky’s nipple slip from his teeth. Bucky gives a quite whine that makes it very hard for Steve to keep his mouth off him long enough to answer the question.

“Very. And alright, the only time I remember having sex is with you and in the middle of a war at that, so maybe I don’t know how fucking etiquette works, but shouldn’t you have asked this before we got naked?”

“My mouth was otherwise occupied then,” Bucky says drily, and yeah, fair enough.

“I want this,” Steve promises him. “I want you. I broke seven decades of brainwashing because of how much I wanted you.”

Bucky looks like he doesn’t know whether to be touched or horrified by that. Both are justified in Steve’s expert opinion.

With that dealt with, Steve returns his attention to Bucky’s obscenely perky nipples. They’re very sensitive, Steve has discovered, and he’s been playing with them for a good five minutes, pinching them between fingers and tugging at them with his teeth while Bucky gasps and whines and scrabbles at Steve’s shoulders like he wants to push him away and also hold on tight.

Steve likes it, likes doing this, likes the silken hardness of Bucky’s nipples on his tongue, likes the sounds he just can’t seem to hold in.

But Bucky, it seems, isn’t done talking.

“It’s – oh fuck, baby, wait, listen, _listen_.”

Steve obediently raises his head and waits patiently for Bucky to gather his brain cells together.

“Jesus Christ,” Bucky says dazedly. “You’re a – Steve, I want this, I do, but Nat said something about imprinting and clouded decision making, like maybe you’re – you’re doing this because I want to?”

“Of course I’m doing this because you want it,” Steve says, wincing when Bucky flinches. “No, not like that. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t want it too, but if I wanted it and you didn’t, then I wouldn’t be doing it.”

Bucky opens his mouth, then snaps it shut.

“I won’t ever be him,” Steve reminds him quietly but forcefully. “Your Captain. I’m him, but I’m not. If you’re waiting for me to be exactly as I used to be, then we might as well stop.”

“No,” Bucky snaps, voice rising. “Fuck. No, Steve, it’s not like that. You _are_ you, I know you. That’s all I need. I know you won’t be the same as before. I’m not the man I was when you – when you fell. That’s not it, Steve.”

Steve lets out a slow breath, his muscles losing their tightness as relief sweeps through him.

“Then what’s the problem?” he asks, leaning in until his forehead is pressed to Bucky’s.

“I don’t know. I just don’t want you to regret it.”

“Sweetheart.” The endearment slips past on its own, but it feels like the most natural thing to call this beautiful man under him. “I’ll never regret you.”

Bucky makes a wounded noise and kisses Steve, something frantic in the movement of his lips. Steve kisses back with matching vigor, and he’s sure already that he’ll never have enough of Bucky’s mouth, his taste, the heat of his body.

Bucky’s pliant and receptive when Steve mouth down his neck, lingering over marks he’s already sucked into the skin, and his chest, pausing to press gentle kisses to both swollen nipples before venturing further down. Bucky’s skin is hot and yielding, and the sound he makes when Steve’s teeth and tongue drags over his flesh are the sweetest he’s ever heard.

By the time he slides his mouth over Bucky’s dick, the entire head is wet with precum, and Bucky’s sounds are verging on desperate.

It’s strange, the weight of a cock on his tongue. Bucky’s fingers tugging at his hair is pleasant though, the little stings on his scalp making sparks sizzle down his spine. He sucks Bucky’s cock, experiments with lips and tongue and teeth. He can’t take it deep; feeling it hit the back of his throat prompts a visceral rejection of the whole sensation. He pats Bucky’s hips in response to his questioning, concerned noise and returns to suckling at the head.

He pulls back soon after and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. It’s satisfying to see Bucky heave for breath with eyes that are more black than blue.

“Verdict?” he asks once Bucky seems capable of speech again.

“_Ohmygod_.” It’s a single, hushed gasp, and Steve smiles, pride glowing in his chest. But then Bucky’s eyes narrow. “You don’t like it though.”

Maybe Steve shouldn’t be surprised that Bucky could figure that out, but he is. He’s happy too. Besides, the websites all recommended communication.

“I liked some parts,” he says truthfully. He likes how Bucky yelped when Steve set his teeth gently to the thick vein on the underside, and he likes how Bucky gushed precum against his tongue like his body was trying to show its appreciation in liquid form. “I wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

Bucky snorts. He’s still a little out of breath.

“You never liked cocksucking before either. It fucked with your asthma when you were smaller. And after the serum, I don’t know, you didn’t much like how it felt.”

Steve has a moment whether he debates whether to be glad or cross that he’s so similar to the man in Bucky’s memories. He settles on the former because it’s not all that bad, these odd reminders that he is indeed Steve Rogers. He’s pretty sure fellatio is not a skill they used to evaluate Captain fucking America so there’s no shadows of heroism he needs to chase.

“Did you?” he asks.

Bucky’s grin is downright manic.

“I like choking on it.”

It’s Steve turn to make a punched-out sound. Bucky’s grin widens.

“I’ll show you sometime.”

“Please do,” Steve chokes out, and then he surges up to kiss Bucky before he can say anything else and possibly make Steve come on the spot.

When they part, Bucky still looks like the cat that got the canary. He’s got a little beard burn on his chin, and his lips are swollen and bleeding at parts where Steve got a little too enthusiastic with his teeth. He leans down and licks it up, groaning at the wrecked whimper Bucky makes.

He settles between Bucky’s legs again and presses a close-mouthed kiss to the head of his cock, almost apologetic. He pulls back, eyeing the inviting spread of Bucky’s thighs and thinking–

“Turn over.”

Bucky hums, confused for a second, before realization settles red on his cheeks. He scrambles to get on his stomach, and Steve’s ears can pick out the frantic thudding of his heart. Bucky raises himself onto hands and knees, and just like that, Steve can’t look away from his ass. It’s a pretty sight, tempting enough to make angels fall.

When Steve licks up a wet stripe up his crack and seals his lips over the puckered hole, Bucky keens high and loud like he’s dying, and Steve decides then and there that _this_ – this he loves.

It’s a hell of a thing, how a man so strong and gorgeous turns into whining, whimpering mess with a tongue in his ass and thumbs tugging at his rim. Steve eats him out until Bucky’s begging with every breath he takes, half the words incoherent but their intent reading loud and clear. He keeps at it, just to hear more of those sounds, and he doesn’t let up until Bucky’s grinding violently back against his face, begging as desperately with his body as his words.

He slides in a finger then, spit-slick and easy with how sopping wet Bucky is.

Bucky moans, a _yes_ buried somewhere in the sound.

He straightens up to better watch his fingers work Bucky open. Bucky hisses a little when Steve drizzles lube over his hole and on his fingers but fucks back into it the next second, demanding more until Steve gives him all he wants, one finger turning into three into four, until Bucky’s spread wide and keening every time Steve’s knuckles press against his rim.

“Enough, enough,” he gasps, reaching back with a hand that Steve takes in his own. “In me, fuck me, come _on_, Steve.”

Steve would tease him for impatience, but he’s no better with his cock hard enough to pound nails, and Bucky’s already been so good for him. He finds his fingers shaking as he lines himself up, and he likes it, how Bucky can pull such simple vulnerability out of him when the worst missions Hydra sent him on couldn’t.

He backs off, abruptly, and Bucky makes a crushed noise to find Steve’s cock’s no longer pressed to his hole.

“I want to see your face,” Steve rasps, tugging Bucky over.

Bucky rolls over easily, and when Steve hikes his legs up, Bucky winds them around his waist and clings tight. His hands shake harder as he slides his dick between Bucky’s cheeks, their slick heat as maddening as it’s inviting.

Then he’s prodding at his hole and pushing past the tight rim and it’s _hot_, Bucky’s body a feverish vice around him.

Steve whimpers, stopping just like that, overwhelmed with sensation.

Bucky cups his face and smiles through his stuttering breaths.

“Feels so good, Steve.”

“I won’t last,” Steve makes himself say. It’s almost too much already, Bucky tight and hot and perfect.

“Don’t gotta, baby, just give it to me.”

Steve does. He bottoms out in a rough thrust, both of them crying out. Bucky tightens his legs around him and his walls ripple around Steve’s dick, and he’s helpless not to move, shaking and shuddering as he falls apart inside Bucky’s body.

He doesn’t last, but he fucks Bucky and jerks him off until he’s sobbing with it, and when pushes in deep and spills into him, Bucky’s release is quick to follow.

It’s a blanketing wave, his mind going fuzzy at the sensation of his own come filling Bucky up and the heat of Bucky’s release over his fingers. He keeps moving, hips grinding against Bucky’s until he can’t, until the two of them are hissing at the stimulation. But he doesn’t pull out. The thought of sliding out of Bucky’s soft, warm-wet clutch is unbearable, and Bucky seems to feel the same, legs still wrapped around Steve as he leads him down into a kiss.

“Missed this,” he says, a sob caught in his breath. “Missed you so much, Steve.”

“I’m here, Buck,” Steve murmurs into Bucky’s mouth, comfort and promise and a million other things. “I’m here, and I’m never gonna leave.”

**Author's Note:**

> Drop me a comment if you can <3


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